Niger Delta: Fuelling the Crisis

Dakar/Brussels:
Militant groups in the Niger Delta are proliferating, and
the country’s security situation will degenerate further
unless President Obasanjo and his administration urgently
address the region’s grievances.

Fuelling the Niger
Delta Crisis,* the latest report from the International
Crisis Group and the third in a series of reports on
Nigeria, examines the often hazy overlap between the
militant Niger Delta cause and criminal and political
motives, and identifies the steps required to defuse the
conflict. Less than a year before Nigeria’s national
elections, a number of militant groups have begun allying
themselves to local politicians with electoral aspirations.
Piracy, kidnappings and attacks against government and oil
industry targets have increased and threaten to escalate and
cripple the oil industry.

“The militant groups have
legitimate grievances, such as poverty, environmental
destruction and government corruption, but they are using
them to justify increasingly damaging attacks against
government and oil industry targets”, says Nnamdi Obasi,
Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Nigeria. “Incentives
for these attacks must be removed if there is to be any hope
of mitigating the violence”.

The militant groups, most
of which appear at least loosely linked with the Movement
for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), know they
can accomplish their goals without winning major battles. It
does not require a sophisticated insurgency to significantly
disrupt Nigeria’s oil production. In this regard, the
militants have a powerful weapon in their arsenal: the
growing anger among the region’s twenty million
inhabitants who feel the government takes much more than it
gives. Popular anger against the government has allowed
these groups to operate openly in many
communities.

Sweeping economic and political reforms with
visible benefits to the local population are critical. The
Nigerian federal government should focus first on granting a
degree of resource control to local communities, and engage
in negotiations with a broad-based delegation of Niger
Deltans. State governments should implement economic reforms
that generate income for health, education and
transportation projects. The international community should
support a comprehensive, independent environmental impact
assessment of the Delta. Energy companies should focus on
increasing transparency, accountability, local participation
and ownership.

“Policymakers – whether they be in
Nigeria or countries that rely on Nigeria’s oil – need
to understand that reform is the only way to promote
stability in the Delta”, says John Norris, Crisis Group's
Africa Program Executive.

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